


Gloaming

by Tamari



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Character Death, Family, Forum: Goldenlake, Gen, Sarain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-19
Updated: 2017-04-19
Packaged: 2018-10-21 01:17:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10674711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tamari/pseuds/Tamari
Summary: Vania's son grows up, but not where the light is.





	Gloaming

**Author's Note:**

> Written for kitsunerei88, with prompt 'Midnight Sun', for the 2015 Wishing Tree at Goldenlake.

Day blends into night here, and weeks feel like years. She doesn’t know how long it has been since she has seen the sun. Darkness has consumed Sarain for decades, but not always so literally. It is an omen, the people whisper. The gods are angry. No heir of this ancient country should be half-Tortallan, even if native blood does run in the queen’s veins.

Vania thinks the gods have proved that they care little about the fate of Sarain.

An alliance with Sarain would be beneficial, her father had thought. Her mother had thought only of her homeland, of her people the K’mir, of finally doing something to fix the war-torn country of her birth. As for Vania, she was raised to know that love was all very well and good, but marriage was a duty for royalty (never mind that Jonathan and Thayet married for love, out of choice, themselves). 

Her husband does not love her. He does not even like her. Grudgingly, he accords her the respect due to the mother of his heir. But that is all it ever will be.

Vania has never learned more than a smattering of Saren. Even her ladies in waiting do not understand her speech, so she spends the vast majority of her time with her son. Wyl learns Saren and broken K’mir, as well as mathematics and history, from his governess, but Vania teaches Wyl Tortallan from the cradle. Soon he speaks with her easily. She raises him on tales of the Lioness and the Sorcerer, of the Wildmage, of her own childhood.

As Wyl grows older, he starts to notice the way the room falls silent in his mother’s wake, and the scathing way the court speaks about her. She does not understand, but he does, and it crushes him to hear how his future subjects feel about his beautiful mother. 

This darkness is unnatural, they say. The sun has reappeared during the years of Wyl’s adolescence, but never enough, never as much as it used to. Crops grow poorly. The country is tired. 

The day his father dies, it is snowing, the sky as dark as charcoal.

In the weeks before Wyl’s official coronation, the murmuring of the people turns to a roar. The Tortallan witch has cursed them. The lowlanders think Vania’s K’mir blood has given her a grudge against them. The K’mir see the Western shape of her face and do not accept her as one of them. Wyl tries to spread goodwill for her, but to no avail.

Wyl remembers little about the day he becomes King of Sarain. But he remembers the next day with piercing clarity, when he walks into his beloved mother’s chambers to find her dead upon the floor. Assassinated.

The letter sent from Tortall, declaring a breach of the alliance and an institution of war, is written in sapphire ink. And when he must send soldiers to fight his mother’s cherished heroes, to fight his own family, the newly crowned King Wyl takes a walk in the neverending dusk and does not let himself cry.


End file.
